DailyPaper - Global News Source news coverage, aggregated from sources all over the world Site developed for the distribution of recent happenings. These may be offshoots of established broadcast or other existing news operationshttps://www.dailypaper.coFanchest raises $4M in seed funding to become the best gift for sports fans

Right here’s an awesome current for a sports activities fan this vacation season: Fanchest is a Brooklyn-based startup that curates and sends team-themed present packing containers as present. The packing containers begin at $59 and embrace about $80 value of attire and kit from no matter professional or school workforce you select.

Immediately the startup has introduced $4M in seed funding with a various group of buyers like New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees, Denver Broncos linebacker Von Miller, Founder and CEO of the Drone Racing League Nick Horbaczeswki and extra conventional VC funds like GoAhead Ventures and Related VC. This brings them to $5.4M in complete funding since beginning the corporate in 2015.

When you gained’t know what precisely is in every chest before you purchase it, bins sometimes embrace a number of items of attire and different themed gadgets like Tervis Tumblers or a keychain. Every field additionally has a “golden ticket” which is a scratch-off recreation giving followers an opportunity to win issues like signed memorabilia or recreation tickets.

The startup additionally gives totally different variations of every field, in case you need to get somebody a repeat current for an additional event however don’t need them to get the identical actual factor. Additionally they have a youth and child providing, and a better priced premium model that comes with a player-signed merchandise.

Proper now you will get packing containers for about 50 sports activities groups from all through the NFL, NHL, NBA, MLB and a few school groups. Since Fanchest doesn’t use a group’s emblem itself, it doesn’t need to undergo a licensing course of for every workforce or league – which means they will scale comparatively shortly. In fact each merchandise contained in the present field is licensed by the groups and leagues, and is sourced from over 100 formally licensed manufacturers that the startup works with.

Fanchest plans on utilizing the funding to assist it broaden to at the very least 25 extra groups subsequent yr, in addition to spend money on growing its repeat buy price for present clients.

]]>https://dailypaper.co/fanchest-raises-4m-in-seed-funding-to-become-the-best-gift-for-sports-fanshttps://dailypaper.co/fanchest-raises-4m-in-seed-funding-to-become-the-best-gift-for-sports-fansshailu.lnct@gmail.com(DailyPost)Swedish 'laser man' Ausonius on trial for 1992 German murderhttps://dailypaper.co/swedish-laser-man-ausonius-on-trial-for-1992-german-murderhttps://dailypaper.co/swedish-laser-man-ausonius-on-trial-for-1992-german-murdershailu.lnct@gmail.com(DailyPost)Lily raises $2M from NEA and others for a personal stylist service that considers feelings, not just fit

One of the reasons recently IPO’d Stitch Fix became so popular among female shoppers is because of how it pairs the convenience of home try-on for clothing and accessories with a personal styling service that adapts to your tastes over time. But often, personal stylists bring their own subjective takes on fashion to their customers. A new startup called Lily aims to offer a more personalized service that takes into account not just what’s on trend or what looks good, but also how women feel about their bodies and how the right clothing can impact those perceptions.

The company has now closed on $2 million in seed funding from NEA and other investors to further develop its technology, which today involves an iOS application, web app and API platform that retailers can integrate with their own catalogs and digital storefronts.

To better understand a woman’s personal preferences around fashion, Lily uses a combination of algorithms and machine learning techniques to recommend clothing that fits, flatters and makes a woman feel good.

At the start, Lily asks the user a few basic questions about body type and style preferences, but it also asks women how perceive their body.

For example, if Lily asks about bra size, it wouldn’t just ask for the size a woman wears, but also how they think of this body part.

“I’m well-endowed,” a woman might respond, even if she’s only a full B or smaller C – which is not necessarily the reality. This sort of response helps to teach Lily about how the woman thinks of her body and its various parts, to help it craft its recommendations. That same woman may want to minimize her chest, or she may like to show off her cleavage, she may say.

But as she shops Lily’s recommendations in this area, the service learns what sorts of items the woman actually chooses and then adapts accordingly.

This focus on understanding women’s feelings about clothing is something that sets Lily apart.

“Women are looking for clothes to spotlight the parts of their body they feel most comfortable with and hide the ones that make them feel insecure,” explains Lily co-founder and CEO, Purva Gupta. “A customer makes a decision because based on whether a specific cut will hide her belly or downplay a feature they don’t like. Yet stores do nothing to guide women toward these preferences or take the time to understand the reasons behind their selections,” she says.

Gupta came up with the idea for Lily after moving to New York from India, where she felt overwhelmed by the foreign shopping culture. She was surrounded by so much choice, but didn’t know how to find the clothing that would fit her well, or those items that would make her feel good when wearing them.

She wondered if her intimidation was something American women – not just immigrants like herself – also felt. For a year, Gupta interviewed others, asking them one question: what prompted them to buy the last item of clothing they purchased, either online or offline? She learned that those choices were often prompted by emotions.

Being able to create a service that could match up the right clothing based on those feelings was a huge challenge, however.

“I knew that this was a very hard problem, and this was a technology problem,” says Gupta. “There’s only one way to solve this at scale – to use technology, especially artificial intelligence, deep learning and machine learning. That’s going to help me do this at scale at any store.”

To train Lily’s algorithms, the company spent two-and-half years building out its collection of 50 million plus data points and analyzing over a million product recommendations for users. The end result is that an individual item of clothing may have over 1,000 attributes assigned to it, which is then used to match up with the thousands of attributes associated with the user in question.

“This level of detail is not available anywhere,” notes Gupta.

In Lily’s app, which works as something of a demo of the technology at hand, users can shop recommendations from 60 stores, ranging from Forever 21 to Nordstrom, in terms of price. (Lily today makes affiliate revenue from sales).

In addition, the company is now beginning to pilot its technology with a handful of retailers on their own sites – details it plans to announce in a few months’ time. This will allow shoppers to get unique, personalized recommendations online that could also be translated to the offline store in the form of reserved items awaiting you when you’re out shopping.

Though it’s early days for Lily, its hypothesis is proving correct, says Gupta.

“We’ve seen between 10x to 20x conversion rates,” she claims. “That’s what’s very exciting and promising, and why these big retailers are talking to us.”

The pilots tests are paid, but the pricing details for Lily’s service for retailers are not yet set in stone so the company declined to speak about them.

The startup was also co-founded by CTO Sowmiya Chocka Narayanan, previously of Box and Pocket Gems. It’s is now a team of 16 full-time in Palo Alto.

Facebook has provided more details about the extent of Russian digital interference related to the UK’s Brexit vote last year.

Last month the social media giant confirmed that Russian agents had used its platform to try to interfere in the UK’s referendum on EU membership — but said it had not found “significant coordination of ad buys or political misinformation targeting the Brexit vote”.

Today’s findings apparently bear out that conclusion, with Facebook claiming it’s unearthed just three ads and less than $1 spent.

The Brexit related Russian-backed ads ran for four days in May, ahead of the UK’s June referendum vote, and apparently garnered around 200 views on Facebook.

It says the ads targeted both UK and US audiences — and “concerned immigration”, rather than being explicitly about the UK’s EU referendum vote.

Which appears to be in line with the strategy Kremlin agents have deployed in the US, where Russian-bought ads have targeted all sorts of socially divisive issues in an apparent attempt to drive different groups and communities further apart.

The Brexit-related ads were paid for by the same Russian-backed 470 accounts that it previously revealed spent ~$100,000, between June 2016 and May 2017, to run more than 3,000 ads targeting US users.

And Facebook linked these accounts to Russia as a consequence of its investigation into Kremlin interference in the wake of the 2016 US presidential election.

For the Brexit audit, it’s worth noting that Facebook appears to have only looked at identified Internet Research Agency (IRA) pages or account profiles — IRA being the previously unmasked Russian troll-farm — so there could be scope for other Russian-backed accounts to have bought ads intending to meddle with Brexit without Facebook realizing it. (Although given the levels of ad buys by IRA accounts targeting US Facebook users it’s perhaps unlikely there’s a second layer to the Russian political dis-ops campaign. Albeit still possible.)

It also does not look like Facebook has attempted to measure and quantify non-paid Brexit-related disinformation posts by Russian-backed accounts — since it’s only talking in terms of “funded advertisements”. We’ve asked and will update this post with any response.

Update: TechCrunch understands that since the scope of the Electoral Commission enquiry relates to activity funded by Russia, Facebook has — thus far — limited its Brexit scrutiny to ad buys. (Thereby making its scrutiny pretty limited.)

We’ve also asked Facebook to share the three Russian-bought “immigration” ads, and to confirm whether they were anti-immigration in sentiment.

So far the company has provided us with the following extract from a letter to the Electoral Commission as commentary on its findings:

We strongly support the Commission’s efforts to regulate and enforce political campaign finance rules in the United Kingdom, and we take the Commission’s request very seriously.

Further to your request, we have examined whether any of the identified Internet Research Agency (IRA) pages or account profiles funded advertisements to audiences in the United Kingdom during the regulated period for the EU Referendum. We have determined that these accounts associated with the IRA spent a small amount of money ($0.97) on advertisements that delivered to UK audiences during that time. This amount resulted in three advertisements (each of which were also targeted to US audiences and concerned immigration, not the EU referendum) delivering approximately 200 impressions to UK viewers over four days in May 2016.

An Electoral Commission spokesperson we contacted for a response emphasized that its discussions with social media companies are at a very early stage.

The spokesperson also confirmed that Google and Twitter have both also provided information in response to its request they do so, to feed its ongoing enquiry into whether the use of digital ads and bots on social media might break existing political campaigning rules.

In a statement, the spokesperson added: “Facebook, Google and Twitter have responded to us. We welcome their cooperation. There is further work to be done with these companies in response to our request for details of campaign activity on their platforms funded from outside the UK. Following those discussions we will say more about our conclusions.”

At the time of writing Twitter and Google had not responded to a request for details of the information they have passed to the Electoral Commission — which late last month Twitter said it would be providing “in the coming weeks”.

A recent academic study of tweet data — looking at how political information diffused on Twitter’s platform specifically around the Brexit vote and the US election — identified more than 156,000 Russian accounts which mentioned #Brexit.

The study also found Russian accounts posted almost 45,000 messages pertaining to the EU referendum in the 48 hours around the vote.

Update: A Google spokesperson has now provided the following response — claiming not to have found any evidence of Russian disinformation ops. “We took a thorough look at our systems and found no evidence of this activity on our platform,” they told us.

Social media’s still unaudited role in political campaigning looks set to remain in the domestic spotlight for the foreseeable future — as the Commission continues to investigate.

Though it remains to be seen whether the body will recommend amending UK law to better regulate political activity on digital platforms.

The UK’s Prime Minister waded into the disinformation debate herself last month by publicly accusing the Russian government of seeking to “weaponize information” by planting fake stories and photoshopped images to try to sow discord in the West.

And the so-far disclosed extent of Russian divisive content targeting the US electorate — which in October Facebook admitted could have reached as many as 126 million people — should give politicians in any democracy plenty of pause for thought about major tech platforms.

Featured Image: Evgeny Gromov/Getty Images]]>https://dailypaper.co/facebooks-brexit-probe-unearths-three-russian-bought-immigration-adshttps://dailypaper.co/facebooks-brexit-probe-unearths-three-russian-bought-immigration-adsshailu.lnct@gmail.com(DailyPost)'Annihilation' trailer discovers mutated monsters in Area X - CNEThttps://dailypaper.co/annihilation-trailer-discovers-mutated-monsters-in-area-x-cnethttps://dailypaper.co/annihilation-trailer-discovers-mutated-monsters-in-area-x-cnetshailu.lnct@gmail.com(DailyPost)CES TVs preview: What to expect from the big screens of 2018 - CNEThttps://dailypaper.co/ces-tvs-preview-what-to-expect-from-the-big-screens-of-2018-cnethttps://dailypaper.co/ces-tvs-preview-what-to-expect-from-the-big-screens-of-2018-cnetshailu.lnct@gmail.com(DailyPost)Google to open AI lab in China - CNEThttps://dailypaper.co/google-to-open-ai-lab-in-china-cnethttps://dailypaper.co/google-to-open-ai-lab-in-china-cnetshailu.lnct@gmail.com(DailyPost)Harry Potter chapter written by bots is magically terrible - CNEThttps://dailypaper.co/harry-potter-chapter-written-by-bots-is-magically-terrible-cnethttps://dailypaper.co/harry-potter-chapter-written-by-bots-is-magically-terrible-cnetshailu.lnct@gmail.com(DailyPost)Apple's $390M for iPhone laser chip maker will 'push boundaries' - CNEThttps://dailypaper.co/apples-390m-for-iphone-laser-chip-maker-will-push-boundaries-cnethttps://dailypaper.co/apples-390m-for-iphone-laser-chip-maker-will-push-boundaries-cnetshailu.lnct@gmail.com(DailyPost)This app will help you figure out if you can fit that Costco-sized paper towel box in your apartment

You’re probably going to get a better deal when you buy consumer products — like paper towels — wholesale, but at the same time you’re also buying a very, very large package of said consumer products. So, they might not always fit in your apartment.

Wholesale goods are the primary play for a startup called Boxed, a retailer looking to play the sort of digital-to-your-door Costco game. But there might be a bit of a challenge visualizing how big those packages are, so the company built an augmented reality tool to demo the sheer size of that massive box of Mac and Cheese you might buy through the app. All things said the AR demo is a little bit of a joke. Built during a hackathon, Fong said that it’s primarily a way to help get the brand out there.

It’s a fun little application, though there will probably be a segment of the universe that would appreciate a warning as to how big a wholesale package of toilet paper will be when sitting in their apartment. Instead, the tool is matched with two other feature updates the company is rolling out: a chatbot and group orders.

“It was a fun project for us to build, and one of the things that we kind of like to hammer in is the idea we sell these bulk goods,” CTO William Fong said. “Being able to envision bulk sizes versus retail sizes plays into the brand. The idea behind it was to convey the idea of bulk, help reinforce the measures that hey these products you’re getting are bigger than your retail packs. It’s really gonna help you stock up for the long run. It’s kind of like a branding but also provide a little practical value for those who might find it challenging to say, ‘how might I fit this in my apartment?'”

Group orders help existing Boxed users summon in their housemates or family members to add products to a Boxed order. But those additional shoppers don’t actually have to log in or sign up for an app, and instead just open up a link and start adding various products to the basket. Then the original user checks out, sending off the order to the company’s fulfillment centers. The extra shoppers will get a prompt at the end of the session to sign up for Boxed, as it’s obviously a user acquisition play as well, though users aren’t required to sign up afterward.

Boxed’s play is to try to always keep you stocked up, to the point that it’ll try to figure out ahead of time when you’re about to run out of toilet paper or snacks. You could easily order those kinds of products on Amazon, though Fong says the play for Boxed is to have a small set of huge wholesale products that it can store in its fulfillment centers and ship out. By doing that, it can be more efficient and be able to potentially compete with Amazon, Fong said.

“When you go to Amazon, it’s very transactional,” Fong said. “You check out with 1 or 2 things, what we notice with Boxed is our customers behave differently. They’re taking more time to finish checkout process because they’re browsing. This might go to multiple sessions, days or weeks.”

The company also said it’ll roll out a chatbot with some limited functionality, which allows users to shop through Facebook Messenger instead of having to go through the app. A chatbot might potentially fragment the user experience and yank potential shoppers out of the app, but Fong said they were trying to have a stripped-down experience that would make more sense in a messaging format. The bot may also help re-engage users, Fong said.

So, two new features that couldactually be useful to shoppers looking to buy wholesale goods, and one that may-or-may-not-be-useful feature in the AR addition — though, as far niche apps go, this niche is a pretty good one.

Crowdfunding service and Kickstarter-competitor Indiegogo is now providing an ICO service alongside its associate, MicroVentures. The corporate will permit customers to take part in SEC-complaint ICOs and, like its slow-burning equity crowdfunding service, will decide and select startups that match sure exacting standards.

These tokens gross sales might be SEC grievance and the gross sales are carried out inside present SEC laws. Their first shopper, a fan-controlled football league, is in pre-sales now.

“Our ICO service is designed to permit the utmost variety of buyers to take part in ICO token pre-sales and gross sales,” stated Slava Rubin, Indiegogo Founder and Chief Enterprise Officer. “We consider cryptocurrency and blockchain applied sciences represent an necessary step in the direction of democratizing finance and introducing new ranges of utility and liquidity to fundraising devices. We need to make ICOs accessible to everybody, not simply accredited buyers.”

Rubin stated that Indiegogo was well-placed to run ICOs because of their international attain and compliance expertise.

“We've 10 million month-to-month customers and attain individuals in 232 nations and territories. We will amplify token gross sales to a broad group of accredited and non accredited buyers,” he stated. “Once we launched fairness crowdfunding in 2016, we partnered with a FINRA registered dealer vendor referred to as Microventures. This partnership permits us to navigate the varied securities and different related legal guidelines and keep a strict degree of compliance for token gross sales. Token sellers worth this as a result of the legal guidelines governing token gross sales are nonetheless evolving and we’re capable of conduct gross sales and pre-sales in compliance with the related legal guidelines.”

Simply eight months after its last round of funding, occasions administration platform Bizzabo has raised one other $15 million. The brand new spherical, which brings Bizzabo’s complete funding thus far to $30 million, was led by Pilot Progress Fairness, with participation from Maor Investments and returning buyers.

Co-founder and chief government officer Eran Ben-Shushan advised TechCrunch that Bizzabo raised extra capital as a result of the corporate is rising shortly and needs to increase its cloud-based occasion software program platform to benefit from market demand.

“We now have each a product market match and a scalable repeatable enterprise mannequin. This progress spherical will assist us scale quicker and convey our occasion improvements to extra manufacturers around the globe,” he stated. The corporate claims its annual income is within the hundreds of thousands and that its annual recurring income grew greater than 200% final yr.

Bizzabo’s cloud-based software program needs to do for occasions what Salesforce did for gross sales and advertising. Like buyer relationship administration software program, Bizzabo’s occasions administration platform automates time-consuming duties associated to e mail, social media and net advertising, manages contacts and analyzes knowledge to assist organizers improve registrations, make extra income and enhance attendee expertise. A few of the organizations which have used Bizzabo for occasions embrace WeWork, HubSpot, GitHub, EA Sports activities, Financial institution of Eire and Train for America.

Bizzabo was based in 2012 as a networking app to assist attendees on the similar occasion discover individuals with comparable pursuits, organize conferences and keep up a correspondence afterward. By 2015, the variety of occasions apps had grown, so Bizzabo started specializing in occasions administration to face out. Its principal rivals embrace Cvent, however Ben-Shushan says Bizzabo’s benefit is that it was created after cellular, cloud software program and social media upended occasions planning and is subsequently capable of adapt extra shortly to the evolving wants of organizers.

In assertion, Pilot Progress co-founder and managing director John DeLoche stated he believes “Bizzabo is the corporate with the most effective platform and management to turn out to be the class chief within the quickly rising, though nonetheless fragmented, $28 billion greenback occasion administration software program market.”

Featured Picture: Caiaimage/Paul Bradbury/Getty Pictures]]>https://dailypaper.co/events-management-platform-bizzabo-raises-15m-growth-roundhttps://dailypaper.co/events-management-platform-bizzabo-raises-15m-growth-roundshailu.lnct@gmail.com(DailyPost)Last chance to save the 'panda of the sea' from extinctionhttps://dailypaper.co/last-chance-to-save-the-panda-of-the-sea-from-extinctionhttps://dailypaper.co/last-chance-to-save-the-panda-of-the-sea-from-extinctionshailu.lnct@gmail.com(DailyPost)Two Reuters journalists arrested in Myanmarhttps://dailypaper.co/two-reuters-journalists-arrested-in-myanmarhttps://dailypaper.co/two-reuters-journalists-arrested-in-myanmarshailu.lnct@gmail.com(DailyPost)As AI and robots rise up, do humans need an upgrade too? - CNEThttps://dailypaper.co/as-ai-and-robots-rise-up-do-humans-need-an-upgrade-too-cnethttps://dailypaper.co/as-ai-and-robots-rise-up-do-humans-need-an-upgrade-too-cnetshailu.lnct@gmail.com(DailyPost)Mixbook photo book service acquires WedPics

In 2012, a Raleigh, NC-based firm referred to as WedPics launched on to the scene to make wedding ceremony pictures rather less of a headache. 5 years and 7 million customers later, WedPics is being acquired by Mixbook, the platform for digitally amassing and modifying bodily photograph books.

The phrases of the deal weren't disclosed.

WedPics is an app that lets a bride and groom combination all of the pictures from their wedding ceremony in a single place. Oftentimes, the completely satisfied couple will set out disposable cameras and use Instagram hashtags to combination photographs taken by friends on the wedding ceremony. Accumulating all of these pictures after the very fact may be tedious.

With WedPics, the couple merely sends an invitation to the app to everybody attending the marriage. People add all of the photographs they take to the app so the couple and friends alike can simply see every little thing in a single place.

The app itself is free, however premium upgrades like the power to print high-res supply information, customise the general feel and appear of the digital album and use personalised URLs, are additionally out there on the platform.

Extra lately, WedPics launched printing to let individuals create bodily photograph albums of their wedding ceremony, which accounts for about 60 % of the corporate’s income.

This falls in keeping with Mixbook’s enterprise, which focuses totally on the digital to print enterprise. As we transfer increasingly more in the direction of a totally digital existence, weddings stay one of many largest causes to print out precise pictures.

As a part of the deal, a ‘handful’ of WedPics 15 staff will head to Mixbook, in response to WedPics founder and CEO Justin Miller. The WedPics model and repair will proceed working beneath the umbrella of Mixbook, who will assist the corporate with its print enterprise.

Messaging platform Line has added the ability for users to retrieve messages they’ve sent in error.

The unsend feature, which has been added via an update out today, gives users a 24 hour window for unsending missives — so it’s considerably more generous than the unsend option rival platform WhatsApp added in October (which offers a mere seven minutes for users to realize their regrets).

Line doesn’t cite WhatsApp in its explainer for launching the unsend feature — claiming instead that it wants to give users “peace of mind” and expand their “communication choices”.

Line’s unsend feature can be used across chat types — in one-to-one conversations, multi-user and group chats.

It will also work whether a message has been read or not.

Message types that can be deleted within 24 hours of being sent are listed as: text and voice messages, stickers, images, videos, URLs, Line Music links, contacts, location information, files, and call history.

However smartphone OS notifications cannot be deleted. In addition, Line’s implementation of the feature displays a notification in the chat room indicating that a message has been deleted.

Which means there will always be a trace of any regretful texts you’ve sent in the previous hours — even if you’re gaining the ability to nix the actual content.

Mobile and desktop versions of Line support unsend, with the (current) exception of the Google Chrome version of Line which will only let users receive notifications for messages their friends unsend. “If you wish to unsend a particular message, please use Line on a different device,” it notes on that.

An additional caveat for the feature to work as billed is that you’ll need everyone in a chat where you want to recall a message to have updated to the version of Line that supports the feature. So there will inevitably be a period of time when unsend will not work as intended.

But, down the line, once all your contacts have updated their apps then Line message recalls should be good to go.

To use the feature, a Line user needs to press (or right click) on the specific message or content they want to recall and then select ‘unsend’ from the menu.